I take “study days”.
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This is a virtual conference, held a few times each year. I’ve spoken at some of the previous events and been really impressed by how smoothly something quite intangible can run! The next event is on Friday 22nd March and is about public speaking – but aimed specifically at developers. If you want to speak at a user group or conference, or be able to get through presentations at work without stress, then this session will give you some good pointers. The speakers are three excellent conference presenters – and me :) I love this format, what else are you doing on a Friday (especially for Europe, where this doesn’t start until our afternoon)? You can register and find out more about the event here http://daycamp4developers.com/. Did I mention that tickets are $40? You can also sign up to get the recordings if the date/time doesn’t work out for you.
There’s been lots of fuss lately about women speakers at conferences, or the lack of them. The low percentage of women in technology and a missing tendency to put ourselves forward for things means that this isn’t going to change any time soon. However if you’ve been thinking about speaking, then you should know about an online group WeAreAllAwesome which is a meeting point for women speakers to brainstorm ideas for topics, put abstracts together, and share experiences on how to give a good talk. Our office hours are 6-7pm UK time on Tuesdays, and I’m one of the mentors in that project, so if you might speak or just want to join in chatter with women who do, then you know where to find us :) Continue reading
I used a tool called pdftk which is excellent, I’ve used it before for doing various other PDF-related things. To grab metadata such as bookmarks, use the dump-data command, like this:
pdftk myfile.pdf dump_data | grep BookmarkTitle > outline.txt
The above line takes all the bookmarks from the PDF (this was a slide deck created using powerdot and LaTeX, the section and slide titles nest appropriately), and outputs a bunch of information about the document and the various PDFs. The grep command just gets the lines containing “BookmarkTitle”, then the whole thing gets written to a file. I cleaned that up and now I have the outline of my course, so I can add timings, notes for the exercises and so on.
See you there!
I don’t really care what else is going on in your API, any “RESTful” API which has a statement such as “all requests are made to http://example.com/rest” is … not RESTful. REST is all about handling representations of resources, each is represented by its own URI and we operate directly on that. If it looks like “pretty URLs”, then it’s probably along the right lines. Continue reading
It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier.
These have been warnings in earlier versions of PHP, but as of PHP 5.4, the date.timezone ini setting must be set correctly, using the continent and place – for me that’s “Europe/London”, like this:
date.timezone = "Europe/London"
If you see these errors, don’t panic, just add the line above to your php.ini.
[blackbirdpie id=”289014953954930688″]
In the raft of responses (and thankyou all, this was fabulous, helpful and entertaining in equal parts!), there were some definite patterns that I’d like to share with you, in no particular order. Continue reading